Malthus, marriage and poor law allowances

revisited: a Bedfordshire case study,

1770–1834*

by Samantha Williams

Abstract

The debate on whether poor law allowance payments to the families of agricultural labourers ‘encour-

aged’ early marriage and large families is still far from resolved, partly because the exact geographical

prevalence and timing of such allowances has not been adequately established. A case study of two

communities in Bedfordshire provides evidence on the timing, duration, and value of such allowances,

as well as detailed information of the family circumstances of labouring families. The study finds that

allowances were largely restricted to periods of particular economic hardship and that they were a

necessary response to increasing family size rather than a cause of such shifts in demographic behaviour.

The debate concerning the impact of poor law allowances on the fertility of agricultural labour-

ers and the extent to which allowances helped promote the population growth of the later

eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is still far from resolved, although recent discussions

have been relatively few. Contemporaries believed there was a strong link between the two. The

Reverend Thomas Malthus was one of the strongest advocates of this viewpoint, putting his

case in his Essay on the Principle of Population (first published in 1798 and revised frequently

thereafter). He believed that parish allowances were one of the key mechanisms accounting for

the rapid population growth of the later eighteenth century. He argued that relief by a scale

which increased in value upon marriage and with the addition of each child was

a direct, constant, and systemical encouragement to marriage before removing from each

individual that heavy responsibility which he would incur by the laws of nature for bringing

human beings into the world which he could not support.

Such a mechanism would lead to a situation in which poor relief would, paradoxically, create

more of the poor it was seeking to maintain. Malthus’s influence on contemporary debates was

profound; it has been argued that Malthus formulated the terms of discourse on the subject of

poverty for half a century.1

* I would like to thank Richard M. Smith for all his advice with this paper. Financial support from the Wellcome

Trust made this research possible.1 T. R. Malthus, Essay on population (London, 1798), p. 83; ninth edn (1888), p. 415; E. A. Wrigley, ‘Malthus on the

prospects for the labouring poor’, Historical J., 31 (1988), pp. 813–29.

AgHR 52, I, pp. 56–82 56

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Research by the Cambridge Group has established that during the ‘long’ eighteenth century

the total population of England increased from 5.0 million in 1686 to 11.5 million in 1821, an

increase of 133 per cent, and the intrinsic growth rate increased from zero to more than 1.6 per

cent per annum. By the early decades of the nineteenth century population was growing faster

than at any previous or subsequent period of English history. Wrigley hypothesised that ‘either

mortality fell very substantially or fertility increased sharply, or both changes occurred but on

a more modest scale’. Wrigley attributes the lion’s share of this rise to an increase in fertility

rather than mortality improvement, and while more recent historiography has reasserted the

importance of mortality, it would still appear that fertility played the more prominent role, via

earlier and more universal marriage. The mean age at first marriage for women fell from 26.5

in 1650–99 to 23.4 in 1800–49. For first-time brides, those in the 20–4 age group became increas-

ingly the most frequent and came to comprise almost half of all marriages 1775–1837. ‘Marriage’,

contends Wrigley, ‘was the hinge on which the demographic system turned’. Marrying three

years younger would produce 1.2 extra children per marriage. With rapidly rising fertility, the

proportion of children under 15 in the population increased from a low point of well under 30

per cent in the 1660s to 40 per cent in the 1820s; and it is reasonable to suppose that under such

demographic conditions children would become a major burden on local ratepayers.

The Cambridge Group’s analysis rests on data generated by two methods: registered demo-

graphic events in parish registers (baptisms, marriages, and burials) for 404 parishes and the

family reconstitution of 26 parishes. This means that ‘national’ trends are calculated by averag-

ing the results. The Group argue that the 26 reconstitution parishes are broadly representative

of England as a whole in terms of occupational make-up, but due to the patchy survival of

sources and the rigorous method of calculation, no urban centres are included. Regional stud-

ies such as that by Hudson and King for Sowerby and Calverley in West Yorkshire can reveal

how far local communities converged or diverged from this national picture and the influence

of occupation on demographic variables. There are not, unfortunately, many of these types of

studies, and it is only through the completion of many more that a fuller understanding of pop-

ulation history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will become possible. Nevertheless,

in Campton with Shefford and Southill (Bedfordshire), one of the Group’s 26 reconstitutions

which will be used for the analysis presented below, age at marriage did fall substantially

throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This fall requires explanation and an

assessment of the extent to which poor relief could have been a contributing factor.2

There is evidence that from the late eighteenth century, families were increasingly allocated

2 E. A. Wrigley, R. S. Davies, J. E. Oeppen and R. S. Schofield, English population history from family reconstitution,

1580–1837 (1997), chs 5 and 7, and in particular Tables 5.4, p. 141, and A9.1, pp. 614–15; E. A. Wrigley and

R. S. Schofield, The population history of England, 1541–1871: a reconstruction (sec. edn, 1989), pp. 215–19, 228–36,

257–65, and Tables 7.15, p. 230, and A.3.1, pp. 528–9; E. A. Wrigley, ‘The growth of population in eighteenth-century

England: a conundrum resolved’, Past and Present 98 (1983), pp. 121–50. On mortality see P. Razzell, ‘The growth of

population in eighteenth-century England: a critical reappraisal’, JEcH 53 (1993), pp. 743–71. On the specific method-

ological problems associated with family reconstitution, see S. Ruggles, ‘The limitations of English family

reconstitution: English population history from family reconstitution, 1580–1837’, Continuity and Change 14 (1999),

pp. 105–30, and see the regional analysis of demographic trends by P. Hudson and S. King, ‘Two textile townships,

c. 1660–1820: a comparative demographic analysis’, EcHR 53 (2000), pp. 706–41.

,

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poor relief. Huzel has argued that, ‘By any criteria, the 1790s must be viewed as a turning point,

for it was in the critical middle years of this decade that poor relief underwent a major and, in

some cases, radical transformation’. This transformation was the widespread adoption of parish

schemes for the relief of able-bodied married labourers, in contrast to the period before the

1790s when the vast majority of parish recipients had been the impotent poor. Such schemes

were a response to the harvest failures of that decade, the rapid price inflation of the

Napoleonic War period, and the post-war agricultural depression, coupled with the demo-

graphic pressure of larger families, and an increasingly seasonal and insecure labour market.

Parishes increasingly resorted to a wide range of schemes, including the provision of subsidised

food; ‘allowances-in-aid-of-wages’, popularly known as ‘Speenhamland’ payments, which were

payments to those men who were under- or unemployed, sometimes scaled according to the

prevailing price of bread and/or the size of the labourer’s family; ‘child allowances’, which could

be flat payments according to the number of children in a labourer’s family (commonly start-

ing with the third or fourth child under 10 or 12), or as part of the ‘Speenhamland’ system; the

‘roundsman system’, whereby labourers without work rotated between the farmers in a parish

and whose weekly income was paid in part from the farmers and topped up by the parish; the

‘labour rate’, under which local farmers chose to either pay the rate or employ labourers with-

out sufficient work; the provision of work, usually on the roads; or the workhouse. These

schemes were incredibly flexible and were on many occasions combined. While there is patchy

evidence that payments to able-bodied men ‘overburdened with large families’ were not new

to the 1790s, it is likely that the extent to which parishes gave allowances for large families was

a new feature of the late eighteenth century. Likewise, it is probable that payments to ‘top-up’

the inadequate wages of labourers only became common after the high price years of the 1790s.3

The vast majority of research on the prevalence of parish allowance schemes and their impact

on fertility and the local labour market relies on the Select Committee on labourers’ wages of

1824 and the Rural Queries collected in 1832. Analyses of this evidence suggests that in 1824

almost 50 per cent of parishes reported that they were subsidizing wages out of the rates while

by 1832 14 per cent were. Much more common were child allowances, with at least three-quar-

ters of parishes responding that they gave this type of relief in 1824, but only 38 per cent of

parishes in 1832. Boyer’s calculations reveal that child allowances were particularly widespread

in the grain-producing south-east, where more than 90 per cent of parishes used child

allowances in 1824, declining to 80 per cent in 1832. There are substantial problems with these

sources. The 1824 Return failed to indicate what proportion of the parishes per county

responded to the questionnaire and their relative populations. It is therefore impossible to

establish whether the replies constitute anything like a representative sample and makes any

assessment of the extent of the allowance system difficult. The Rural Queries suffer from simi-

lar problems, since replies were returned for only 10 per cent of the 15,000 parishes in England

and Wales, accounting for just 20 per cent of the population. The wording of the 1824 and 1832

3 J. P. Huzel ‘The labourer and the poor law, 1750–1850’, in G. E. Mingay (ed.) The agrarian history of England and

Wales, VI, 1750–1850 (1989), pp. 755–810, at p. 773. This chapter by Huzel provides the best overview of the debate. A

review of the Speenhamland decisions and scales can be found in A. Aspinall and E. A. Smith (eds), English histori-

cal documents, 1783–1832 (1969), pp. 414–15.

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questionnaires are also problematic. The 1824 Select Committee asked: ‘Do any labourers in

your district employed by the farmers receive either the whole or any part of the wages of their

labour out of the poor rates?’ The use of the word ‘any’ allowed an area to answer positively

while making only negligible or sporadic use of these supplements, and this could account for

the extremely high level of parishes reporting the allocation of child allowances. The 1832 Rural

Queries asked parishes whether they paid child allowances, whether they gave any outdoor relief

or wages out of the rates to employed able-bodied labourers, and whether these allowances

were paid according to a scale. It seems likely that by asking questions about different forms of

poor relief in so quick succession, parish officers gave answers confusing the schemes. In fact

only 910 parishes answered the question relevant to child allowances. Furthermore, Blaug does

not assess whether the parishes giving answers in 1824 and 1832 were the same parishes or types

of parish.4

More crucial, however, is the fact that reliance on this evidence has limited much of the dis-

cussion to the decade immediately preceding the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. Relatively

little is known about allowances from their more widespread adoption in the late eighteenth

century until these reports, or about allowance schemes between 1824 and 1832. If we hope to

assess the impact of allowances upon fertility, it is crucial that we establish the extent to which

parishes resorted to these schemes in the same time period as fertility soared and age at

marriage fell: that is, after 1750. While it is argued by those historians relying upon official

reports that allowance schemes were widespread in the 1820s and 1830s, much of the largely

sporadic local evidence of allowances in the second half of the eighteenth century and up to

the 1820s suggests that allowance schemes were largely temporary expedients in response

to high prices, extremely localized at the parish level, and abandoned after the crisis had

passed. These studies will be reviewed later in the article and their findings will be compared

to those of Campton and Shefford. If indeed flexibility at the level of the parish is the key to

child allowances and Speenhamland payments, then it seems it might prove difficult to estab-

lish the exact prevalence and timing of allowances on any widespread scale. As Poynter has

asserted, the crucial question is how often allowances were ‘a mere temporary expedient,

4 Amongst the historians relying upon this data are M. Blaug, ‘The myth of the old poor law and the making of

the new’, in M. W. Flinn and T. C. Smout (eds), Essays in social history (1974), pp. 123–53, at pp. 129–30; id., ‘The Poor

Law Report re-examined’, JEcH 24 (1964), pp. 229–45, at pp. 234–5; J. P. Huzel, ‘Malthus, the poor law, and popula-

tion in early nineteenth-century England’, EcHR 23 (1969), pp. 430–51, id., ‘The demographic impact of the old poor

law: more reflections on Malthus’, EcHR 33 (1980), pp. 367–81; id., ‘Parson Malthus and the Pelican Inn protocol: a

reply to Professor Levine’, Historical Methods 17 (1984), pp. 25–7; G. Boyer, An economic history of the English poor

law, 1750–1850 (1990). Other historians who have contributed to this debate are D. A. Baugh, ‘The cost of poor relief

in south-east England, 1790–1834’, EcHR 28 (1975), pp. 50–68; D. Levine, ‘Parson Malthus, Professor Huzel, and the

Pelican Inn protocol: a comment’, Historical Methods 17 (1984), pp. 21–4; J. A. Goldstone, ‘The demographic revolu-

tion in England: a re-examination’, Population Stud., 49 (1986), pp. 5–33; M. Neuman, ‘Speenhamland in Berkshire’,

in E. A. Martin (ed.), Comparative development in social welfare (1972), pp. 85–127; id., The Speenhamland county:

poverty and the poor laws in Berkshire, 1782–1834 (1982). The figures cited here for 1824 and 1832 are from Blaug,

‘Myth’, pp. 129–30; Blaug, ‘Re-examined’, p. 241; Boyer, Economic history, p. 153. The problems with these sources are

discussed by Blaug, ‘Re-examined’, pp. 231–2, 234, and N. Verdon, ‘The rural labour market in the early nineteenth

century: women’s and children’s employment, family income, and the 1834 Poor Law Report’, EcHR 55 (2002),

pp. 299–323, at pp. 302–3.

,

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abandoned after the emergency, and how much it became the normal method of maintaining

labourers’.5

Those historians relying upon the government reports of 1824 and 1832, the most prominent

of whom are James Huzel and George Boyer, have sought not only to establish the prevalence

of allowances but also to test the relationship between poor relief and population growth. Both

Huzel and Boyer have examined the impact of parish allowances on birth rates at the parish

level, and drawn opposing conclusions from their results. Huzel argued in 1980 that parish

allowance schemes were implemented in the 1820s following a period of high birth rates and

concluded that:

The evidence suggests that the Malthusian proposition should, if anything, be turned on its

head. It is much more plausible to contend that the allowance system, far from acting as a

crucial catalyst to population increase, was a response to it.

Huzel’s evidence was sufficiently persuasive to lead Joel Mokyr to comment in 1985 that ‘the

demographic argument against [the Poor Law] has been effectively demolished’, but it obvi-

ously did not sway Roger Schofield, who, in the same year speculated that ‘the fall in the age

at marriage may . . . have owed much to social attitudes that . . . allocated welfare preferentially

to married males as heads of families’. The most recent contribution to the debate came from

Boyer in 1990. It has already been noted that Boyer estimates that up to 90 per cent of rural

parishes in the south-east gave child allowances in the early 1820s. He contends that allowances

which were scaled by the number of children in a family would have provided a strong incen-

tive for marriage and parenthood. Such allowances could increase a labourer’s annual income

by around 14 per cent for each child granted an allowance, which would be a total of 85 per

cent of his annual income if he had three children. Boyer claims to have established a strong

correlation between parishes which allocated child allowances at the third child in the 1820s and

1830s and higher birth rates, calculating that parishes that began allowances at three children

experienced birth rates 25 per cent greater than those parishes without allowances.

Proving the direction of causation is always problematic, but Boyer claims that the provision

of allowances caused higher birth rates, and he concludes that ‘the payment of child allowances

did indeed cause an increase in birth rates. Malthus was right’. It is equally plausible that

allowances were a necessary response to the poverty faced by large families in the early nine-

teenth century. Boyer assumes a high degree of voluntary control over childbearing in

labouring families, an assumption which contradicts Malthus’ view and modern demographic

research that it was the age at marriage which was the crucial factor governing fertility rather

than changes in marital fertility. If instead we take Boyer’s findings to mean that in parishes

where child allowances started at three children, couples decided to marry earlier, it would

5 J. R. Poynter, Society and pauperism. English ideas on poor relief, 1795–1834 (1969), p. 83. A detailed assessment

of the debate so far concerning the influence of the Poor Law on fertility and age at marriage, and the severe limi-

tations of the Parliamentary Papers, will be provided in Samantha Williams, ‘Poor law practice and fertility change

in England, 1700–1834: a review’ (forthcoming).

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imply that couples would have had to wait at least five years before they became eligible for

such schemes.6

The fundamental flaw in previous research is that little is known about the family circum-

stances of the actual recipients of parish allowances. This methodological problem is fully

realised by Huzel, who has suggested that in order to assess the impact of poor relief on fertil-

ity fully, the ideal methodology would combine parish registers and detailed poor law records,

thereby allowing for family reconstitution of those actually in receipt of poor relief. This arti-

cle presents the results of just such an exercise. The parish was the unit where the giving and

withholding of allowances was a daily, concrete, business. The research covers the period from

1770 to 1834 and thereby illuminates the under-researched period from the 1790s to the 1820s.

The technique of nominal record linkage between poor law sources and parish registers for the

communities of Campton and Shefford in Bedfordshire allows us to know, for the first time,

the demographic characteristics of recipients of poor relief. Such a methodology reveals the

proportion of labourers’ families in receipt of allowances, the sums such households received,

the exact timing and duration of allowance payments, and the size of their families at the point

of receiving relief and afterwards. This research thereby throws new light on the impact of fam-

ily allowance payments on the marriage decisions of the labouring poor. At the centre of the

discussion is the extent to which allowances encouraged, or were a necessary response to,

population growth.7

I

Campton and Shefford lie nine miles south-east of Bedford, in Bedfordshire, a corn-growing

county in the south Midlands. Campton was an average-sized agricultural parish, while

Shefford was the neighbouring small market town with a more diverse occupational structure.

Common land in these communities was enclosed in 1798. From the first census in 1801 to the

1841 census, population in Bedfordshire increased in line with national totals at roughly 79 per

cent; the rate was slightly higher in Shefford at 87 per cent, from 474 to 889, while the popula-

tion of Campton increased less, at 58 per cent, from 316 to 501. By 1841 the populations of

Campton and Shefford had, like the wider population, become particularly youthful: in

Campton 38 per cent of inhabitants were aged under 15 and in Shefford the figure was 36 per

cent. In terms of occupational structure, the censuses reveal that an increasing proportion of

Campton’s inhabitants were employed in agriculture, from a figure of 62 per cent of families

in 1811 to over 80 per cent in 1831, while the number employed in trade, manufacture and hand-

icrafts fell from 35 per cent of families to between 10 and 15 per cent. By 1841 two-thirds of men

listed as occupied in the census were employed as labourers and 14.5 per cent in manufactur-

ing occupations. In Shefford by contrast, the majority of families (61 per cent in 1811) were

employed in trade, manufacture and handicrafts. By the following decade this figure had risen

6 Quotes from Huzel, ‘Demographic impact’, p. 380;

J. Mokyr, ‘The industrial revolution and the new eco-

nomic history’, in J. Mokyr (ed.), The economics of the

industrial revolution (1985), p. 11; R. S. Schofield, ‘English

marriage patterns revisited’, J. Family History 10 (1985),

pp. 18–19; Boyer, Economic history, p. 150.7 Huzel, ‘Parson Malthus’, p. 27.

,

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to 85 per cent, but by 1831 the proportion of families employed in this way had fallen to 40 per

cent, while 51 per cent were now employed in the elusive ‘other’ category. The proportion of

families employed in agriculture shrank from 35 per cent in 1811 to nine per cent in 1831. By 1841

38.1 per cent of men were returned as employed in manufacture and 12.6 per cent in distribu-

tion and trade, but a substantial section of the male labour force (22.2 per cent) were

agricultural labourers. The trade was chiefly in corn, timber, coal and iron, which were trans-

mitted by river to and from King’s Lynn. Three times a year cattle fairs were held in the town.

The lace and straw trades became significant employers of women and children in the county

towards the end of the century, with lace-making predominant in the north and greater

recourse to straw-plaiting in the south. By the early nineteenth century in the parishes outside

the northern region of the county, lace-making had given way to straw-plaiting under the

inducement of higher earnings. In 1801 Arthur Young had observed lace-making in Shefford,

but by 1808 Thomas Batchelor noted that the expansion of the plaiting district in Bedfordshire

had ‘spread rapidly’ over the southern, central and eastern district ‘as far as Woburn, Ampthill,

and Shefford’. Central markets for straw plait were at Luton and Dunstable, in the south of the

country, but Shefford also provided a local market for plaiters and dealers. By 1841, 54 per cent

of women recording an occupation in Campton were classified as straw-plaiters and 28 per cent

in Shefford. The market town offered more opportunities for domestic service than Campton,

with 23 per cent of women recorded as female servants.8

Before proceeding, the representativeness of Campton and Shefford needs to be addressed.

As a rural parish dominated by agriculture, Campton could be taken as a proxy for other agri-

cultural parishes in the south and east of England. The presence of the lace-making and

straw-plaiting trades, which provided employment for women and children throughout the

period investigated here, would have mitigated the worst aspects of male agricultural labourer

under-employment. Other regions in the south and east of England were experiencing the col-

lapse of rural industry, in particular spinning, while opportunities in lace-making and

straw-plaiting, although in decline after 1815, still provided employment for substantial num-

bers of women and children in Bedfordshire. In the 1830s it has been estimated that the earnings

of women and especially children made substantial contributions to the family economy and

it was child wages that had the major impact in offsetting the low earnings of men. This does

not, however, rule out Bedfordshire as unrepresentative. This was one of the counties in which

contemporaries (and many historians) believed parish allowances to have been widespread.

Bedfordshire was identified by the 1824 select committee as one of the six counties most

addicted to the allowance system and allowances were mentioned in the parliamentary reports

8 The average population per parish in 1831 for English agricultural counties was 534 and the median was 394. See

P. Laslett, The world we have lost – further explored (1983), pp. 53–5, 304. Enclosure in Campton and Shefford is dis-

cussed by A. Young, ‘Minutes concerning parliamentary enclosures in the county of Bedford’, Annals of Agriculture,

42 (1804), p. 27. The populations and occupational distribution of Campton and Shefford are taken from the

abstracts of census returns, 1801–1841. For the national totals see Wrigley and Schofield, Population history, App. 6,

Table A6.7, total (1). The age structure of Campton and Shefford in 1841 is given in S. K. Williams, ‘Poor relief, wel-

fare and medical provision in Bedfordshire: the social, economic and demographic context, c. 1770–1834’,

(unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1998), ch. 2 and specifically Tables 2.4 and 2.5, p. 62. 37–28 per

cent of females recorded an occupation in the census. On lace-making and straw-plaiting in the country, see

N. Verdon, Rural women workers in nineteenth-century England: gender, work and wages (2002), chs 1 and 5.

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for 1824, 1827, 1830, and 1832. Bedfordshire was one of Mark Blaug’s now infamous hard core

of ‘Speenhamland counties’ in 1824 and 1832. In the final years of the Old Poor Law the county

had one of the highest levels of per capita poor expenditure of any county in England and

Wales, at 16s. 4d. per head of population in 1834. Bedfordshire, along with the six other coun-

ties of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Cheshire, Cornwall, and Cumberland

were all cited by the Poor Law Report of 1834 as typical of the country as a whole: ‘We believe,

in short, that a fairer average of the whole country cannot be taken’. It is clear that Bedfordshire

is an appropriate county upon which to test Malthus’s thesis, but we might need to qualify the

result as more typical of south Midland counties with the presence of lace-making and straw-

plating: Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, and Northamptonshire. Shefford provides a useful

point of contrast to Campton and highlights urban-rural differences in parish administration.

Again, south Midland counties were smattered with small market towns.9

The primary source for the research presented here is overseers’ account books for Campton

(1767–1834) and Shefford (1794–1828), which give lists of sums spent weekly on the poor, the

name of the pauper, the amount given, and frequently the reason for the payment. These

account books have been nominally linked to the existing family reconstitution for the two

communities. Reconstitutions link together the baptisms, marriages and burials recorded in the

Anglican parish registers for families and across generations. The methodology of linking poor

law accounts with family reconstitutions is extremely time-consuming but ultimately reward-

ing since it permits the reconstitution of paupers’ families. In Shefford over 70 per cent of

families could be linked to the family reconstitution, while in Campton the figure was even

higher, at over 90 per cent. In the cases of those families who could not be linked, it was some-

times possible to glean further information on the size of the family from the entries in the

overseers’ accounts. For the purposes of this article, the poor law histories – or ‘pauper biog-

raphies’ – of families have been analysed. When we consult the parish accounts we find lists of

men in receipt of poor relief, but it is only when this information is linked to the reconstitu-

tion that we know whether an individual was married with children, and in this manner it is

possible to identify the majority of families in receipt of poor relief of some kind.

Methodological problems still remain. It is difficult to distinguish between the different types

of parish allowance schemes in both communities. Child allowances are only clearly identifi-

able in Campton between January and December 1800 and at no point is specific mention made

of Speenhamland scales of relief in either parish. Allowances-in-aid-of-wages are made in both

parishes in the period after 1815 in the form of payments to the unemployed and under-

employed, but it is not known if these payments were linked to a scale which aimed for a

minimum income for a family or whether they were merely intended to top up earned wages

9 Sokoll charts the immiserating impact of the collapse of wool spinning in Essex in T. Sokoll, Household and

family among the poor. The case of two Essex communities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (1993).

On women’s and children’s contribution to the family economy in Bedfordshire and other south Midland counties

with rural industry, see Verdon, ‘Rural labour market’. For Bedfordshire in official reports, see P. Grey, ‘The pau-

per problem in Bedfordshire from 1795–1834’, (unpublished M.Phil dissertation, University of Leicester, 1975). Blaug,

‘Myth’; id., ‘Re-examined’. The Commissioners’ view of Bedfordshire as average is cited in Blaug, ‘Re-examined’,

pp. 232–3. Poor relief per capita from W. Apfel and P. Dunkley, ‘English rural society and the New Poor Law:

Bedfordshire 1834–47’, Social Hist., 10 (1985), pp. 37–68, Table 1, p. 40.

,

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to prevailing rates. This suggests that the types of allowance schemes identified in the second-

ary literature might actually be artificial and that historians’ definitions have been imposed on

a situation which was seen in less precise terms by local poor law administrators. As we shall

see below, poor relief to families in these case-study communities was highly flexible, and sup-

ports other evidence of the sporadic nature of poor relief payments to families, rather than the

more established viewpoint of the widespread prevalence of allowance schemes in the south

and east. The evidence from Bedfordshire is similar to that found by Mark Neuman in his study

of 16 Berkshire parishes. Neuman concludes that it is usually assumed that Speenhamland pay-

ments were ‘ordered, universal and persistent’, but he found that allowances were in fact often

sporadic and locally diverse.10

II

At the turn of the century, magistrates in Bedfordshire recognized that cash payments to able-

bodied men had increased rapidly since the late eighteenth century. At their meeting in 1801,

county magistrates had rejected a specific scale because it was considered to be lacking in flex-

ibility, but they recommended that the county’s overseers ‘afford such extraordinary relief to

all their labouring poor in proportion to the size of their families and other circumstances as

may be adequate to their necessities during the continuance of the present pressure’. A few

years earlier, in the particularly high price year of 1795, Quarter Sessions had ordered that all

bread had to be standard wheaten bread; in 1801 this order to bakers was re-issued, and it was

recommended that some of the allowance was to be made up in kind and that substitutes for

bread corn were to be provided at moderate prices. If overseers did not adopt the recommen-

dations, magistrates were recommended to hear complaints of the poor. In Ampthill in 1797

parish officials had agreed to have monthly meetings to fix the level of allowances. The hun-

dred of Clifton, which contained Campton and Shefford, reported that food substitutes were

10 Poor law account books for Campton and Shefford are found in Bedfordshire and Luton Archives and Records

Service, Bedford (hereafter BLARS), P18/12/1–2, X514/1–3, P70/12/1–2. Transcription of Campton’s and Shefford’s

overseers’ accounts into a MS Access database resulted in over 80,000 records. The family reconstitution for

Campton-with-Shefford and Southill is held at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social

Structure, University of Cambridge. Shefford was a chapelry in the parish of Campton at this time, but since the

two places were separate for the purposes of poor law and church administration, it is appropriate to view the two

places as separate communities. In the family reconstitution, Southill – a contiguous parish – was also reconstituted

along with Campton and Shefford. The overseers’ accounts for Southill survive, but do not always name paupers,

thereby making it impossible to construct the detailed pauper histories assembled for Campton and Shefford. On

reconstitution methodology, see E. A. Wrigley, ‘Family reconstitution’, in E. A. Wrigley (ed.), An introduction to

English historical demography (1966), pp. 96–159. Higher linkage rates for an agricultural parish (Campton) compared

to a bustling market town (Shefford) are to be expected, since we would anticipate a higher turnover of population

in the latter. Those who were linked were more likely to have stayed in the parish long enough to record events in

the parish register. This was especially true for families, who were receiving relief because they were in the process

of having children, and baptisms for these children were recorded in the relevant parish register. For further details

on linking poor law sources with family reconstitutions, see S. R. Ottaway and S. K. Williams, ‘Life course and life-

cycle: reconstructing the experience of poverty in the time of the Old Poor Law’, Archives 23 (1998), pp. 19–29.

Neuman, ‘Speenhamland in Berkshire’, pp. 99, 101–9.

AGHR52_1.qxd 15/06/2007 10:23 Page 64

generally used, and some parishes distributed flour and herrings to labouring families at

reduced prices.11

In 1818 a magistrate acknowledged before a House of Lords committee that the granting of

allowances had become very common in Bedfordshire.12 The same general picture is apparent

from the evidence collected for the 1832 Rural Queries, relied upon so heavily by many histori-

ans. At least 10 out of 16 parishes responding to the questionnaire gave allowances on account

of children, commencing with the third or fourth child under 10. It is not clear how represen-

tative these parishes might be since they only accounted for 12 per cent of parishes in the

county. The proportion of families in receipt of child allowances varied enormously: in

Willington only one man, with a very large family, received an allowance; in Cople only four

families out of 136 were allocated relief; in Kempston 53 families were in receipt of allowances

from a possible 348 families; and in Westoning almost all labourers received allowances for

their families. In Redbornstoke hundred, all of the 14 parishes were to some degree operating

allowances for single men as well as those with a family. On average 14 per cent of families in

each parish were dependent on relief, but there was a staggering variety parish by parish, the

figure varying between 14 and 60 per cent. Child allowances in Lidlington were flexible and

were frequently adjusted according to the cost of living: ‘Of late, relief is given only if there be

four children; formerly money was often allowed for the third child, and in dearer times I

believe for the second child’. Again, the evidence suggests that considerable flexibility was the

hallmark of the allowance systems in many parishes. Similarly, while allowances for families in

Bedfordshire were mentioned in the early nineteenth-century parliamentary reports, payments

varied with economic conditions and from parish to parish.13

Although this evidence points to the use of allowances in many Bedfordshire parishes, it is

still too sparse for us to make an estimation of the prevalence of allowance in the county

between 1790 and 1834. There were 141 rural parishes in the county and it is evident that we

know little of the day-to-day parish administration of all of these places over this long

time span. Where we do have detailed evidence of this type is our case study communities

of Campton and Shefford and it is to the results of this detailed reconstitution of pauper’s

families that this article will now turn.

III

The data presented here relates to all long-term poor relief payments to families. ‘Families’ are

defined as married couples with children aged 14 and under. It has been assumed that children

over the age of 14 were independent from their parents, working away from home as servants

or apprentices, or living in lodgings. Although we do not know the age at which children

11 BLARS, QSM 19, p. 135; 21, pp. 15–16, 35–6, P30/8/11;

F. G. Emmison, ‘The relief of the poor at Eaton Socon’,

Bedfordshire Historical Record Soc. 15 (1933), chs 31–4.12 BPP, 1818, V, Evidence of the Rev. Hugh Wade

Geary in ‘Report of Lord’s committee on the Poor Laws’,

1817, printed in Report of the Select Committee on the

Poor Laws (1818), p. 73 (separately paginated).

13 P.P. 1834, XXX, Report from His Majesty’s

Commissioners for inquiring into the administration and

practical operation of the poor laws, App. (B.1), ‘Answers

to rural queries in five parts’, part 1, qq. 24 and 25 [here-

after Rural Queries]. The government reports are

discussed by Grey, ‘Pauper problem’.

,

AGHR52_1.qxd 15/06/2007 10:23 Page 65

typically flew the nest in these communities, since there are no local censuses for Campton and

Shefford, Wall has estimated that around 60 per cent of children left home between the ages of

15 and 19. Families were eligible for both long-term relief, called ‘pensions’ by parish overseers,

and occasional relief in cash and kind. Casual forms of benefits included cash in times of tem-

porary illness, food and drink, fuel, clothing, help with paying the rent, with the costs of

childbirth, christenings and funerals, the apprenticeship of children, the provision of nursing

and medical care, the topping up of benefits from friendly societies, and even exemption from

liability for the poor rate. A poor house provided accommodation for a few of the poor in

Shefford, usually the transient. Pensions have been defined here as regular weekly payments for

at least six months, and such payments accounted for at least two-thirds of parish spending on

the poor. This contrasts with King’s findings for six parishes in the south and east where, as a

proportion of parish spending on the poor, pensions increased over the eighteenth century to

almost two-thirds by the 1770s but thereafter fell to around 40 per cent in the 1820s. Since both

contemporaries and historians have assumed that allowances in some form were widely avail-

able throughout most of the post-1790 period, it is necessary to assess the extent to which

families received these long-term pension payments from the parish. From the pauper biogra-

phies of ‘family-pensioners’ it is possible to establish exactly who was in receipt of a pension

and their family circumstances. In order to assess the ‘attractiveness’ of parish pensions to fam-

ilies, this section considers the timing, duration, and value of relief to family-pensioners in the

two communities.14

There is a great deal of evidence in the secondary literature that relief lists grew increasingly

male and younger from the late eighteenth century. It has been claimed by Dunkley and Boyer

that it was the under-employed male, and men overburdened with large families in particular,

who came to dominate the relief lists after 1790. In Berkshire, for instance, the number of fam-

ilies in receipt of some sort of poor relief increased more than three-fold between 1764 and 1801.

Other research has confirmed this picture. King has shown that the recipient lists in 14 rural

south and eastern parishes moved from being heavily skewed towards women in the 1760s (only

30 per cent male) to being heavily skewed towards men in the early nineteenth century (just

over 60 per cent male), although the decline in the numbers of women pensioners was far less

dramatic and more women were again relieved regularly by the 1820s. It is clear that men took

an increasing share of pension payments. Age-specific information from four parishes reveals

that between the 1780 and 1815 relief was increasingly allocated to the young, although elderly

men were reclaiming their place as recipients after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. King is not

able, however, to establish that this increase in payments to those under 50 took the form of

‘Speenhamland’ type schemes which paid male heads of families. Ottaway’s research on the eld-

erly stops at 1800, but she has shown for Terling (Essex) and Puddletown (Dorset) that

although there were increasing numbers of adults under 60 coming on to poor relief, the

proportion of parish spending given to the elderly remained high at between one-quarter and

14 Wall estimates that for every hundred offspring aged 10–14, resident with their parents, there might be fewer

than 40 still present aged 15–19. R. Wall, ‘Leaving home and the process of household formation in pre-industrial

England’, Continuity and Change 2 (1987), pp. 77–101, at p. 91. S. King, Poverty and welfare in England, 1700–1850: a

regional perspective (2000), pp. 155–6.

AGHR52_1.qxd 15/06/2007 10:23 Page 66

40 per cent. It seems likely from these studies that families were increasingly allocated

occasional relief but that the elderly were not marginalised from the relief lists.15

Over the entire period for which there are overseers’ accounts for the two Bedfordshire com-

munities, there were only 24 clear cases of pensions to families in Campton (1767–1834) and 21

in Shefford (1794–1828). As a proportion of all pensioners per decade, in Campton families

made up 11 per cent in the 1760s and 1770s, none in the 1780s, and then rose to 29 per cent in

the 1790s and 26 per cent in the 1800s, thereafter falling to 23 per cent, 15 per cent and 7 per

cent in the 1810s, 1820s, and 1830s respectively. In Shefford the proportion was always much

lower, with families accounting for 17 per cent of pensioners in the 1790s, rising to 31 per cent

in the 1800s, falling to 15 per cent in the 1810s and rising slightly to 21 per cent in the 1820s. This

somewhat distorts the picture, however, since families largely came onto poor relief at specific

times. In Campton payments to families were largely restricted to the ‘crisis’ periods at the turn

of the century and following the end of the Napoleonic Wars. In Shefford, there was a similar,

although less pronounced, concentration of family-pensioners around 1800, but there was no

clustering following Waterloo; rather, it was in the 1820s that most families came to require

relief. In Campton and Shefford, it was lone women, as single women, unmarried mothers,

widows with children, and especially elderly widows rather than families who dominated the

relief lists throughout the period. In Campton lone women made up between just over half and

three-quarters of pensioners until the 1790s, when their proportion fell to 43–58 per cent (but

still the largest group) in the period 1790–1820, and thereafter rose again to 50 per cent. In

Shefford, by contrast, lone women always made up a greater proportion of pensioners at

between 50 and 62 per cent between 1790 and 1830. In a recent study of the north Lincolnshire

parish of Broughton, lone women dominated the lists of pensioners. In terms of the propor-

tion of parish spending, families were always allocated far less than lone women in these two

Bedfordshire communities. In Campton, less than six per cent of all spending on the poor was

allocated to family-pensioners before the 1790s, but this increased to 11 per cent in the 1790s,

15–24 per cent in the 1800s, 1810s and 1820s, before falling back to just three per cent in the

1830s. Of all the expenditure on out relief in the Essex parish of Ardleigh in 1796–7,

child allowances accounted for just eight per cent. In Shefford not only were fewer families

relieved, but they were allocated less in terms of pensions and occasional relief in cash and kind,

receiving 12–20 per cent of these payments between the 1790s and 1820s. Again, lone women in

both communities were given the bulk of money and relief in kind, with at least three-quarters

of this spending going to them in Campton, and 69–71 per cent in Shefford, except for the

1820s then their share fell to just 30 per cent. It is likely that some of this increase in relief to

15 P. Dunkley, The crisis of the old poor law in England, 1795–1834: an interpretive essay (1982); Boyer, Economic his-

tory. Other studies which reveal an increasingly male recipient list are R. M. Smith, ‘Ageing and well-being in early

modern England: pensions trends and gender preferences under the English old poor law, 1650–1800’, in P. Johnson

and P. Thane (eds), Old Age from antiquity to post-modernity (1998), pp. 64–95; P. Slack, The English poor law,

1531–1782 (1990), pp. 54–5; B. Stapleton, ‘Inherited poverty and life-cycle poverty: Odiham, Hampshire, 1650–1850’,

Social Hist., 18 (1993), pp. 339–55; S. W. Taylor, ‘Aspects of the socio-demographic history of seven Berkshire parishes

in the eighteenth century’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Reading, 1987), p. 405; King, Poverty and welfare,

ch. 6; S. R. Ottaway, ‘Providing for the elderly in eighteenth-century England’, Continuity and Change 13 (1998),

pp. 391–418.

,

AGHR52_1.qxd 15/06/2007 10:23 Page 67

families in Shefford during the 1820s was due to chronic under-employment, with some of the

male household heads being old, despite still having some children at home. This will be dis-

cussed further below.16

It is possible to calculate the proportion of families these pensioners constituted from the

numbers of families given in the censuses of 1801–1831. In the decade 1801–1810 a large propor-

tion of Campton’s families were in receipt of pensions, at up to 28 per cent. After that date far

fewer families received parish support, however, and the proportions fell to between 14 and 17.5

per cent between 1811 and 1820, and to around 10 per cent between 1821 and 1830. In Shefford,

a much smaller percentage of the town’s families received pensions: between 6 and 11 per cent

between 1801 and 1810, 4.5 to 5.5 per cent between 1811 and 1820, and 5 to 6 per cent between

1821 and 1830. It seems likely that fewer families received allowances in the market town since

agricultural labourers were a small, and contracting, group. This is hardly the flood of families

relying upon the poor law which has been described by other historians, most notably Blaug

and Boyer.17

Tables 1 and 2 lists all the family-pensioners in receipt of parish pensions over the period.

Before the 1790s in Campton, only two families received a pension: John and Sarah Waller and

their one-year-old daughter, who received a pension from October 1768 for seven months, until

the deaths of Sarah and their daughter; and Thomas and Ann Hayes and their five children, who

had a pension from 1777 until Thomas died in 1780, after which the parish paid Ann a widow’s

pension. In the 1790s, pensions began for William and Lucy Newman (1792–1798) and Charles

and Ursula Bland (1798–1811, 1816, 1821). Before the crisis years of the turn of the century, there-

fore, only four families received parish pensions over the whole of the 31-year period 1767–1798.

In Shefford, the overseers’ accounts do not begin until 1794, and so we cannot establish the

number of family-pensioners in the decades before the 1790s. Nonetheless, from the start of

Shefford’s accounts in 1794 and until the crisis years 1800–02, only two families, those of James

Chapman (1795–1802) and Robert and Mary Savage (1794–1805) received a parish pension.18

Harvest failures and wartime inflation caused many families to seek relief from the poor law

authorities at the turn of the century. In Campton between April 1799 and April 1800 11 new

families received parish pensions which conform to ‘classic child allowances’ in that they were

paid on a scale according to the number of children in a family and adjusted every few months

in line with volatile prices. Table 3 gives the duration of these allowances in Campton. The

highest price year at the turn of the century in Feinstein’s cost of living index is 1800, but it

would appear that local prices in Campton were higher in 1801: child allowance sums peaked

in that year, as well as in terms of overall spending on all of the poor. Allowances started at the

16 The handful of militia men’s families have been

excluded from these figures. R. Dyson, ‘The experience

of poverty in a rural community: Broughton, north

Lincolnshire, 1760–1835’, Local Population Stud., 70

(2003), pp. 11–28; R. Wall, ‘Families in crisis and the

English poor law as exemplified by the relief programme

in the Essex parish of Ardleigh, 1795–7’, in Ochiai Emiko

(ed.), The logic of female succession: rethinking patriarchy

and patrilineality in global and historical perspective

(International Research Centre for Japanese Studies,

international symposium 19, 2002), pp. 101–27, at p. 108.17 Numbers of recipients were calculated as a propor-

tion of the census populations taken from the abstract of

census returns, 1801–1831.18 Although there are no burials recorded for Robert

and Mary Savage, their children are referred to in the

overseers’ accounts as if they were orphans.

AGHR52_1.qxd 15/06/2007 10:23 Page 68

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second child, with 6d. per child per family per week, and so initial child allowance payments

for two children were 1s. 0d. per family per week, 1s. 6d. for three children, and 2s. 0d. for four

children. Overseers did not follow the scale slavishly, however, and appear to have been

extremely sensitive to changes in local prices and the personal needs of each family, since the

level of payments varied enormously over the period 1799–1802. While on the whole the more

children the allowance was supposed to be for, the higher the allowance, there were consider-

able variations in the allowance within each category of family size. At the beginning of the

child allowance scheme, for instance, families with four children were given 2s. 0d. a week,

which quickly rose to 3s. 0d.; thereafter, however, payments were between 2s. 0d. and 5s. 0d. for

families with four children. The parish withdrew allowances to three of the families by the end

of 1800 and to a further seven eight months later, in August 1801, while payments continued

until March 1802 for Knight’s family. The most common length of time that these child

allowances were paid was 21 months but their length varied between seven and 28 months. It

is evident that there was a high degree of flexibility in this scheme, with payments adjusted up

and down according to need and the scheme only endured for as long as the crisis.

When the pauper biographies of these families are examined, however, it becomes clear that

although all the payments were made for a set number of children, most of these couples had

more children than the number specified in the overseers’ accounts. William and Elizabeth

Newman, for instance, were allocated 3s. 0d. a week for their ‘four children’, but they also had

another two children, six in total, alive at the time of the pension: James Hine was the eldest

at 12, Elizabeth was 10, William was 8, John was 6, Ann was 4, and Sarah was 2. In addition,

the couple had a further two babies while in receipt of a child allowance. That the payments

were intended for only four of their children suggests that the eldest were working or appren-

ticed (since there are no burial dates for them), that children at the breast were not included,

and that these payments were intended for William, John, Ann and Sarah. Likewise, James and

Mary Ingram were allocated 2s. 0d. a week for two of their children, but they had five children

Name

3. Duration of Family Allowances in Campton, c. 1800

Dates Months

James & Mary Gregory Apr 1800 – Oct 1800 7

James & Phoebe Austin Feb 1800 – Aug 1800 7

Cornelius & Jemima Johnson Apr 1799 – Aug 1800 17

John & Kitty Deverix Jan 1800 – Aug 1801 20

Joseph & Ann Whittemore Dec 1799 – Aug 1801 21

William & Elizabeth Newman Dec 1799 – Aug 1801 21

James & Mary Ingram Dec 1799 – Aug 1801 21

John & Ann Halfhead Dec 1799 – Aug 1801 21

Henry & Mary Clarke Dec 1799 – Aug 1801 21

Jonathan & Mary Jordan Dec 1799 – Aug 1801 21

Thomas & Elizabeth Knight Dec 1799 – Mar 1802 28

Source: as Table 1.

,

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under 15 and another who was only a month old. Jonathan and Mary Jordan received 3s. 0d. a

week for four of their children, but they had in fact six children under 15, one of whom was

only 14 months old. A large family with many young children, and in many cases a new baby,

would appear to be the qualifications for these allowances. It would appear that many of the

older children were not included in the calculation (even some under 10), suggesting that many

of them were working, and this would seem reasonable considering the high proportion of chil-

dren working in Bedfordshire in this period from a young age, in lace-making or straw-plaiting.

This means that families were eligible for child allowances for shorter lengths of time than those

in parishes where children were eligible until they were 10 or 12 years old. That many families

had more children than for whom they were receiving relief is an important new finding and

only results from the careful construction of pauper biographies.19

In Shefford, fewer families required parish pensions at the turn of the new century despite

its larger size; six families were allocated pensions. Payments began in Shefford between

October and December 1800, later than in Campton. The duration of these allowances is shown

in Table 4. Payments ceased to the Herbetts and Odells in July 1801, to the Stephens in October

of the same year, but not to the Smiths until April 1802. The family of William Hanks received

a pension a little later, between August 1801 and April 1802. The average duration of these

allowances was around 12 months. In addition, John Bird’s family received two large payments

of £2 1s. 10d. in May and £1 in December 1801. The pension allocated to Thomas and Mary

Seeley started somewhat earlier, in February 1799 and continued much longer, until 1807. There

was no explicit reference to allowances by scale in the overseers’ accounts and so, unlike

Campton, the number specified by overseers and the actual number of children per family can-

not be compared. Payments in the market town were not perfectly synchronized with the

number of children per family, but families with four children did generally receive more than

19 Of the nine families where it was possible to compare the number of children stated in the overseers’ accounts

and the family reconstitution forms, only one family had the same number of children in each; that is, eight fami-

lies contained more children than for whom the allowances were specified (40 children in total on the forms,

compared with 24 given in the overseers’ accounts). On the age of work for children, see Williams, ‘Poor relief in

Bedfordshire’, ch. 7 and O. Saito, ‘Who worked when? Life time profiles of labour force participation in Cardington

and Corfe Castle in the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries’, Local Population Stud., 22 (1979), pp. 14–29.

For the price series, see C. Feinstein, ‘Pessimism perpetuated: real wages and the standard of living in Britain dur-

ing and after the industrial revolution’, JEcH 58 (1998), pp. 625–58.

4. Duration of Family Allowances in Shefford, c. 1800

Name Dates Months

William & Jane Herbett Nov 1800 – Jul 1801 9

William & Mary Hanks Aug 1801 – Apr 1802 9

William & Sarah Odell Oct 1800 – Jul 1801 10

William & Ann Stephens Oct 1800 – Oct 1801 12

Thomas & Mary Smith Dec 1800 – Apr 1802 17

Source: as Table 2.

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those with fewer children. Considerable flexibility at the parish level can be seen once again:

pensions were allocated to these families for differing amounts of time (between nine and

17 months) and pensions were assessed according to local prices and the personal needs of the

families. Shefford’s overseers also gave out shorter-term relief during these years: to James and

Ann Cannon, who was heavily pregnant, and their two children, for the three months between

November 1795 and January of the following year, and to Samuel and Martha Ebden and their

child for the five months between February and June 1801.

Of the families who received child allowances in Campton 1799–1802, six required further

relief later in their lives. William and Elizabeth Newman returned to the relief rolls in 1804,

John Deverix and his family in 1805, and the Clarke family in 1805–6 and again in 1808–13. The

other three families came back onto poor relief during the agricultural depression following the

Napoleonic Wars: the Whittemores 1816–22, the Knights 1816–19 and the Ingrams 1816–18. A

further four families drew relief for the first time after 1815: James and Elizabeth Newman and

their children 1817–21, the families of John and Mary Lennard and John and Nelly Hathfield in

1817, and William and Mary Smith and their two children (in 1816–17). Table 5 shows the dura-

tion of these post-war family pensions. Thomas Stevens and his family had joined the list of

family-pensioners in 1810 and continued to receive a pension not only throughout the imme-

diate post-war period along with these other families, but until 1826. Of those families receiving

a pension after 1815, most began between November 1816 and January 1817, but there was no

usual end point and pensions lasted for between eight and nine months for the Lennards and

Smiths, around three years for the Ingrams and Knights, and between five and six years for the

Newmans and Whittemores. Of the families relieved in the post-war depression, three required

further relief: Lennard’s family were again granted a pension between 1821 and 1832, the

Newmans in 1826 and 1827, and the Hathfields between 1828 and 1831. Four new families

came on to the relief rolls in the 1820s and 1830s. The Devonshire family received a pension in

1820–1. Two families required relief in 1828–1830: the Devereuxs with seven children and the

Stevens and their five children. In the early 1830s only James and Harriet Devereux were

allocated relief. Many other families also received short-term relief in the 1820s and 1830s for

periods of unemployment.

Name Dates Duration of pension

years months

John & Nelly Hathfield 1817 8

John & Mary Lennard 1817 8

William & Mary Smith 1816–1817 9

James & Mary Ingram 1816–1818 2 5

Thomas & Elizabeth Knight 1816–1819 2 8

James & Elizabeth Newman 1817–1821 4 11

Joseph & Ann Whittemore 1817–1822 5 5

Source: as Table 1.

5. Duration of Pensions in Campton c. 1815

,

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In Shefford only ten families received parish pensions in the next three decades after the turn

of the century. There was no concentration in the immediate post-war period as there was in

Campton, but rather a steady trickle of families in receipt of long-term relief. Furthermore, in

the case of four of these family-pensioners, it is clear that, although they had dependent

children, the pension was in fact intended to assist in old age, unemployment and illness. John

and Priscilla Smith received a weekly payment for two years between 1820 and 1822, during

which time they had two babies, but the overseers recorded that John had a ‘bad arm’ which

kept him from working. Thomas and Sarah Stevens had children aged four and one when they

came onto relief in February 1828, but Thomas, who had been admitted to the Bedford

Infirmary in 1820, required a further visit in August 1828 and substantial parish support. Austin

Bowers still had one child under 15 (12 years old), but was himself aged 65 and received regular

relief in the two years leading up to his death in 1826. Likewise, although a daughter is

mentioned in the overseers’ accounts for Thomas Seeley and his wife, Thomas is described as

‘old’.

Tables 6 and 7 show the duration of allowances (excluding those paid c. 1800). In Campton

over the entire period 1767–1834, 13 families received pensions for a year or more, but only five

of these received longer-term pensions of five years or more. In Shefford, ten families received

pensions for a year or more, but once again, only five of these families received pensions for

five or more years. Shorter-term pensions – between 6 and 12 months – were awarded to six

families in the rural parish and to two families in the market town. In addition in the market

town, some families were paid large lump sums (see Table 8). In the majority of these cases the

length of time these payments were intended to cover was not recorded by the parish overseer,

but it is likely that these were out-relief pensions.20

It is evident that in these two communities family-pensioners were largely concentrated in the

period 1798–1802, with a further concentration of family-pensioners in Campton after 1815; out-

side of these periods, far fewer families required assistance. It is no wonder that Bedfordshire

magistrates thought allowances common in the county in 1800 and 1818, but this does not mean

that allowances were pervasive throughout the period 1790 to 1834. These periods of pensions

to families will not have been recorded in the parliamentary papers of 1824 and 1832 upon which

so many historians rely. The evidence available before 1824 from other local studies confirms

the picture that many parishes adopted allowance schemes in the short-term, usually only in

times of exceptionally high prices. In the Essex parish of Ardleigh it was predominantly agri-

cultural labourers’ families with young children who were deemed as ‘deserving’ poor relief dur-

ing the catastrophic winter of 1795–6 and they were allocated cash payments in proportion to

family size, subsidized flour, and free coal. The parish again gave poor relief to families on the

‘flour list’ between October 1799 and October 1801. Other Essex parishes assisted large families

with allowances between 1795 and 1801, but relief was limited to periods of very high prices and

20 Out-relief pensions were paid to families legally settled in Campton or Shefford but living elsewhere. Those

with a settlement in these two communities were eligible for relief from Campton or Shefford only, and not the

parish in which they were residing. In practical terms, this meant that the overseers sent pensions in lump sums to

the overseers in the claimants’ parish of residence. See T. Sokoll (ed.), Essex pauper letters, 1731–1837 (Records of social

and economic history, new ser., 30, 2001).

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entitlement to them controlled. Generally, when prices fell, allowances were discontinued. In

terms of the proportion of labouring families in receipt of such allowances, the Essex parish of

Great Saling paid between 10 and 14 labourers out of a total of around 50 labourers in the parish.

In a later period, allowances were allowed to families of four and above in the parish of Thaxted

in 1812, but again only for the duration of high prices. Likewise, in Kent and Sussex systematic

relief to the able-bodied in the form of bread scales was most often found in crisis years such as

1776, 1801 and 1813, and that the sale of subsidised flour and the lists of the casual poor were only

short-term. Neuman, in his study of 16 Berkshire parishes, found that allowances were often

temporary responses to unusually severe seasons and high prices. We have already noted his

point that whilst it is assumed that Speenhamland payments were ‘ordered, universal and per-

sistent’, allowances were in fact often sporadic and locally diverse. Sokoll, commenting on poor

relief policy in Ardleigh in the 1790s, argues that it is striking how quickly the overseers

responded to the worsening material conditions of the poor and that this is true for downward

swings in wheat prices as well as upward ones. He suggests that this is evidence against any ‘rev-

olution of rising expectations’ with regard to poor relief. The most recently published mono-

graphs by Alan Kidd, Steve King and Lynn Hollen Lees have concluded from these local studies

Name Dates Duration of pension

years months

John & Kitty Deverix 1805 6

Henry & Mary Clarke 1805–1806 6

James & Elizabeth Newman 1817–1821 6

James & Elizabeth Newman 1826–1827 6

John & Sarah Waller 1768–1769 7

James & Sarah Devonshire 1820–1821 8

William & Elizabeth Newman 1804 10

James & Harriet Devereux 1833 1 0

Joseph & Mary Stevens 1828–1830 1 6

William & Hannah Devereux 1828–1830 1 7

John & Nelly Hathfield 1828–1831 2 3

James & Mary Ingram 1816–1818 2 5

Thomas & Ann Hayes 1777–1780 2 6

Thomas & Elizabeth Knight 1816–1819 2 8

William & Lucy Newman 1794–1798 4 5

Henry & Mary Clarke 1808–1813 5 0

Joseph & Ann Whittemore 1817–1822 5 5

John & Mary Lennard 1821–1832 10 11

Charles & Ursula Bland 1798–1812 14 3

Thomas Stevens 1810–1826 16 0

Source: as Table 1.

6. Duration of Pensions in Campton, 1767–1834

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that allowances were a temporary expedient adopted during particularly hard times and were

rapidly reduced or abandoned when conditions became easier.21

How much were these pensions worth to families? Pensions paid out during the crisis years

at the turn of the century were likely to have been only ever supplementary to earned income,

and this is reflected in the figures cited above whereby families were allocated proportionately

less in terms of pensions and occasional relief than they accounted for in numbers. Allowances

in the two communities ranged from between 1s. 0d. and 3s. 0d. per family per week, with the

most commonly given sums of 2s. 0d. and 3s. 0d., and depended on the size of the family and

their personal needs and local prices. The fact that they were paid at all suggests that the parish

authorities believed the incomes of labouring families to be insufficient in the face of harvest

failures and wartime price inflation. Child allowances ‘topped up’ incomes to a ‘minimum’

standard envisaged by local overseers and magistrates. Local weekly male wage rates in

Bedfordshire in the 1790s were between 7s. 0d. and 9s. 0d., and so the average allowance of 25d.

a week represented between 23 and 30 per cent of these wages. Horrell and Humphries have

computed the average annual income of families employed in low wage agriculture at around

£26 at this time, so the average allowance might have represented 21 per cent of annual income.

It is likely that child allowances accounted for a smaller proportion than this in Campton and

21 Sokoll, Household and family, ch. 5; Wall, ‘Families in crisis’; A. F. J. Brown, Essex at Work, 1700–1815 (Essex

Record Office publications, 49, 1969), pp. 151–3; Baugh, ‘Poor relief in south-east England’; Neuman, ‘Speenhamland

in Berkshire’, pp. 99, 101–9; id., The Speenhamland county; A. Kidd, State, society and the poor in nineteenth-century

England (1999), p. 15; King, Poverty and welfare, p. 34; Lynn Hollen Lees, The solidarities of strangers. The English Poor

Law and the people, 1700–1948 (1998), pp. 66–8.

Name Dates Duration of pension

years months

William & Nelly Richardson 1811–12 8

James Sibley 1820–21 8

James & Ann Humberstone 1812–13 1 2

Thomas & Sarah Stevens 1828–29 1 2

James & Martha Whitbread 1827–29 1 7

William Clow 1821–23 1 9

John & Priscilla Smith 1820–22 1 11

Austin & Elizabeth Bowers 1824–26 1 11

Braybrook 1817–1824 6 10

James Chapman 1795–1802 7 0

Thomas and Mary Seeley 1799–1807 8 2

James & Ann Kempston 1811–1822 10 6

Robert & Mary Savage 1794–1805 11 0

Source: as Table 2.

7. Duration of Pensions in Shefford, 1794–1828

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Shefford, since wives and children contributed to the family economy through their lace-making

and straw-plaiting. During the French Wars, despite price inflation, the cessation of foreign

imports had increased demand and so wage levels in the two trades. In 1795 women could

earn from 6s. 0d. to 12s. 0d. a week straw-plaiting and children between 2s. 0d. and 4s. 0d. a

week. In 1808 earnings over 12s. 0d. a week were recorded for women straw-plaiters and women

lace-makers could earn between 5s. 0d. and 9s. 0d. a week. It must be remembered that straw-

plaiting was seasonal and high earnings were restricted to the months between April and June,

when the price of plait doubled. Due to this, it is difficult to estimate the annual income of a

labourer’s family. Of three budgets of labouring households from a neighbouring parish in 1795,

the average allowance represented 16 per cent of annual income. Elsewhere, Wall has estimated

the value of the crisis relief provided by the overseers in Ardleigh, Essex, between December 1795

and March 1796, taking £30 as a possible annual income of a labourer’s family. He found that

although the combined schemes of child allowance cash payments, subsidized flour, and free

coal would have accounted for up to 55 per cent of a labourer’s annual income. These benefits

did not entirely compensate for the rise in wheat prices, falling short by around 15 per cent.22

It is more difficult to make similar calculations for allowances in Campton in the immediate

post-war period since the duration of allowances and the sums received by each family varied

enormously, and far less could be earned in lace-making and straw-plaiting. In 1832 women lace

makers could only earn between 1s. 6d. and 3s. 0d. a week, and earnings had fallen sharply to

between 5s. 0d. and 10s. 0d. a week in straw-plaiting, although these earnings still compared

22 Wall, ‘Families in crisis’, pp. 113–15; F. M. Eden, The state of the poor: or a history of the labouring classes in

England (3 vols, 1797), III, p. cccxxxix.

Name Dates Husband’sage at

marriage

Wife’s age atmarriage

Numberof children

Agesof children

Completedfamily size a

William & Mary Hanks 1798 – – 2 4, 1 3

John Bird 1801 – – ‘family’ – 3 b

William & Nelly Richardson 1804–1808 – – ‘family’ – 3 c

James & Ann Kempston 1807–1808 – – 3 13, 11, 8 7

1811 2 12, 1

8. Family-Pensioners in Shefford: Lump Sums, 1794–1828

Benjamin & Rebecca Gilbert 1810 31 – 4 twins 14twins 10

11

Joseph & Rebecca Stonbridge 1822 – – ‘family’ 3 b

Source: as Table 2.Notes: a these figures are for families who have been successfully linked to the family reconstitution and include par-ents and all living children (excluding children who die, even after the end of the period here), except for thosemarked b, who are families who could not be linked to the family reconstitution, but who are described in the over-seers’ accounts as ‘family’, ‘wife’, ‘boy’, ‘son’, ‘girl’, ‘daughter’, ‘child(ren)’, and so these figures represent a minimumnumber of family members. c William and Nelly Richardson are linked to the reconstitution, but, although they haveregistered no births in Shefford, the overseers’ accounts refer to a ‘family’.

,

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favourably with male earnings in agriculture of between 9s. 0d. and 12s. 0d. Lennard’s family

was allocated an allowance for just eight months and received £2 13s. 6d., while Whittemore’s

family received an allowance for six years, averaging £11 per annum. Since a number of fami-

lies received pensions over several years, it is clear that the post-war depression’s effect was

longer than the previous crisis. In addition, unemployment and under-employment became

pervasive for the many men and boys employed in agriculture. It is unlikely that families

received much assistance from local charities or self-provisioning, although rather more could

be obtained from friendly societies in times of sickness and unemployment. In Campton char-

itable relief was limited to just £5 in cash and two-penny loaves distributed once a year, and in

Shefford there was no charitable provision for the poor. Following enclosure in 1798 few fam-

ilies had access to common rights. Friendly societies rapidly increased in number in the first

half of the nineteenth century, and in 1803–4 there were four in Shefford, with a total of 146

members. This could account for 31 per cent of the town’s inhabitants, although it is likely that

not all of these members were from Shefford, but that some members lived in neighbouring

parishes, possibly including Campton. Payments could be as high as 8s. 0d. a week, but such

pay-outs were restricted in duration and, moreover, they were only for bouts of illness or tem-

porary unemployment. In times of high prices, such as 1799–1801 and 1815–22, or for longer

periods without sufficient work, labouring families had no option but to turn to the poor law.23

In both communities, most families received less than £7 a year in regular poor relief. Some

were allocated between £7 and £14, but only a handful received payments higher than £14 a year.

In the case of one family only – the Kempstons of Shefford – were payments so high that the

parish must have been their main source of income and the sums they received were quite

exceptional; their average annual payment was £18 and between 1812 and 1820 the annual pen-

sion never fell below £14, and was as high as £28 in 1813 and £25 in 1814. In Campton, John and

Mary Lennard received comparable sums, but only for 1824 (£30) and 1825 (£28); in other years

they received around £10. Similarly, Charles and Mary Bland, Henry and Mary Clarke, and

Thomas Stevens’ family were all given sums as high as £15 or £20 in specific years, but they

more commonly received far less.

There were important urban-rural differences in relief allocation to families between

Campton and Shefford. As a proportion of pensioners, Shefford relieved fewer pensioner-fam-

ilies and spent proportionally less on them than Campton. This could merely reflect the fact

that there were far fewer labourers, and a decreasing number, in the market town, although

this would be to assume that only the families of agricultural labourers required parish assis-

tance, and not the families of those employed in other occupations. After 1815 it is possible

that women and children earned less in lace-making and straw-plaiting and the incomes of

their families might have required supplementing by the parish. More broadly, Shefford did

relieve a smaller proportion of the total population than Campton, giving pensions to around

23 Wage rates taken from Eden, The state of the poor, II, p. 2; N. Verdon, Rural women workers, ch. 5. S. Horrell

and J. Humphries, ‘Old questions, new data, and alternative perspectives: families’ living standards in the industrial

revolution’, JEcH 52 (1992), pp. 849–90. The evidence on alternative sources of income is from: BPP, 1823, VIII,

Reports from Commissioners: charities in England and Wales, pp. 7–9. BLARS, X465/320 (Indenture, 1834); Young,

‘Minutes concerning parliamentary inclosures’, p. 27; Rural Queries for Bedfordshire; BPP, 1803–4, XIII, Abstract of

Answers and Returns relative to the Expense and Maintenance of the Poor, pp. 1–8.

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15 per cent of inhabitants between 1811 and 1831, whereas Campton relieved up to 30 per cent

of their residents. Campton also spent more on its resident poor. Many other urban centres

relieved fewer families and spent considerably less on their poorer inhabitants. In 1792, Howlett

had observed that not only large manufacturing towns, but also parishes that were partly town

and partly country relieved fewer people and spent significantly less on their poorer inhabi-

tants. In the Essex parishes containing the towns of Thaxted and Stebbing, one-quarter of their

populations were relieved, whereas in four rural parishes up to one half received poor relief.24

We have seen that for the majority of families parish pensions were supplementary and lim-

ited to very specific years of great hardship. Couples could not have predicted that at some

point in the future, when they had started to raise a family, they would be eligible for these

allowance schemes. It is doubtful that poor relief, limited in terms of duration and amount,

could have ‘encouraged’ couples to marry and ‘breed recklessly’. We have also seen that many

families in receipt of relief at the turn of the century had very large families and the wait

between marriage and qualifying for relief would have been long. Rather, allowances were given

in the crisis years of 1800–1 to families who already had a large number of children. The evi-

dence presented to this point shows that families only received pensions on a large scale after

1790 and that allowances in Campton in 1800 were given to large families. This suggests that

parish allowances could only have been a necessary response to previous falls in the age at mar-

riage and the consequential increase in fertility which fuelled rapid population growth. The

timing of the fall in the age at first marriage is therefore crucial if we are to confirm that

allowances were the response to, rather than the cause of, this change.

IV

Age at marriage for all women in Campton and Shefford fell steadily throughout the seven-

teenth and eighteenth centuries. The figures for female mean age at marriage in

bachelor/spinster marriages in 50-year blocks are shown in Table 9 and reveal a steady decline.

Age at marriage fell more sharply in Campton and Shefford than in the country as a whole.

Figure 1 shows much the same information but in greater detail, with data for the period

1700–1830 divided into ten-year periods. Age at first marriage for women declined from 25.3 in

1700 to 23.0 in 1790, to its lowest point at 20.9 in 1810, but rose slightly to 22.8 in 1830. Male age

at first marriage declined more sharply, from 27.3 in 1700, to 23.4 by 1790, and fell further to 22.1

in 1830. When viewed in this long-term perspective, men’s and women’s ages at marriage had

been falling for at least a century before allowances were introduced. It has to be conceded that

the age of brides fell from a plateau of 23 in the 1780s, 1790s and 1800s, to just 20.9 in the decade

1810–19, and it could be suggested that this further and significant fall coincides with the allo-

cation of allowances to seven families after 1816; but there was no similar fall for grooms and,

taken in this broader chronological sweep, it is difficult to sustain this line of argument. It seems

far more likely that allowances were a necessary response to the rapid population increase over

24 Williams, ‘Poor relief in Bedfordshire’, ch. 4; Huzel, ‘Demographic impact’, pp. 369–75, and especially Table 2;

Brown, Essex at work, pp. 151–3; J. Howlett, ‘On the population and situation of the poor in England’, Annals of

Agriculture 18 (1792), pp. 573–81.

,

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the century, as well as to the harvest failures of the 1790s and 1800s, the price inflation of the

war years, and the unemployment and under-employment of the post-war period.25

All this suggests that some families came to require assistance after 1790 because they had

25 Campton-with-Shefford and Southill family reconstitution; Wrigley et al., English population history, pp. 134,

146–7, 184–5, 192–3. The numbers observed for average age at first marriage in Campton-with-Shefford and Southill

per decade, 1700–1830, are: 1700–09 husband 18, wife 32; 1710–19, 24, 28; 1720–9, 25, 38; 1730–9, 23, 32; 1740–9, 15, 34;

1750–9, 17, 28; 1760–9, 40, 39; 1770–9, 30, 34; 1780–9, 27, 46; 1790–9, 39, 53; 1800–09, 44, 63; 1810–19, 31, 49. Ruggles

has pointed out that because family reconstitution effectively misses late marriages after migration, it is possible that

the average age at marriage is understated, although Wrigley argues that this does not pose a serious problem, as the

mean age at marriage of ‘stayers’ is identical to ‘leavers’. S. Ruggles, ‘Migration, marriage and mortality: correcting

sources of bias in English family reconstitution’, Pop. Stud., 46 (1992), pp. 507–33; E. A. Wrigley, ‘How reliable is our

knowledge of the demographic characteristics of the English population in the early modern period?’, Historical J.,

40 (1997), pp. 571–95.

Period Male mean ageat marriage

Female mean ageat marriage

1600–49 27.3 25.3

1650–99 26.8 24.4

1700–49 26.6 24.4

1750–99 24.7 23.3

1800–37 23.5 22.4

Source: Campton, Shefford and Southill reconstruction.

9. Mean age at marriage in bachelor/spinster marriages

in Campton-with-Shefford and Southill

1. Average age at first marriage in Campton-with-Shefford and Southill, 1700-1830

Source: Campton, Shefford and Southill reconstruction.

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married young and had a larger family. Tables 1, 2 and 3 give the age at first marriage, where

known (and for only small numbers), for all the couples with children receiving parish pen-

sions in both communities. In Campton the average age of brides was 21.5 and 24 for grooms,

while in Shefford the average age for brides was 22.2 and 23.4 for grooms. These figures are sim-

ilar to those given in Figure 1 and suggest that these brides and grooms were not so very

different from their peers. A fair number did marry young, with just under half of all these

women for whom we can establish an age at marriage marrying in their teens: Kitty Deverix

and Harriet Devereux, for instance, were 17, and Priscilla Smith married at just 16. It must be

remembered that the other half of the family-pensioner brides were in their twenties when they

married. There were 143 marriages in Campton, Shefford and Southill between 1767 and 1834

of ‘young marriers’, that is where one spouse was known to be in their teens. These numbers

are swollen since they include those also marrying in Southill, but of these 143 marriages only

10 couples later received poor relief in Campton or Shefford. Furthermore, Tables 1, 2 and 3

also make it clear that many of the families who required parish assistance went on to have

more children without requiring further parish assistance, and this suggests that it was ‘hard

times’ rather than marrying young or having a large family alone that tipped the balance for

these families and necessitated a period of parish assistance.26

Other recent demographic research also supports the argument that there was no causal rela-

tionship between welfare provision and changes in marriage behaviour. Rather, it appears that

age at marriage was falling for all social groups in many different regions and not just for those

who might be in receipt of parish allowance payments. The unusually full records for the retail

and handicraft town of Banbury, Oxfordshire, and the river port of Gainsborough,

Lincolnshire, make it possible to calculate the age at first marriage by occupation. In both com-

munities age at marriage fell throughout the eighteenth century for men and women of all

social groups, and in Banbury there was a remarkable convergence in female age at marriage

at around 24 by 1800. On a much wider scale, the most important trend to emerge from recent

work at the Cambridge Group – Wrigley et al.’s English Population History from Family

Reconstitution – is that nuptiality displayed similar patterns across all of their 26 reconstitution

parishes. Despite marked differences in the occupational make-up of these parishes, all the

communities experienced a marked fall in age at first marriage; the fall was, they argue, remark-

ably uniform both geographically and in socio-economic terms and the age at marriage for all

social groups converged towards the end of the eighteenth century. They suggest that this evi-

dence points towards a marked homogeneity in marriage behaviour throughout the country.

It is not my purpose here to speculate on the reasons for the decline in age at marriage, but

rather to insist that there is little substantive evidence from the perspective of welfare provision.

If historians want to explain this phenomenon, then they will have to look elsewhere.27

26 These figures exclude Bowers, who married far later

than the other grooms. It is possible that this is a second

marriage.27 On age at marriage by occupation in Banbury and

Gainsborough, see P. M. Kitson, ‘Seasonal perspectives

upon relationships between fertility, nuptiality and eco-

nomic change in England, c. 1538–1800’ (PhD thesis in

progress, University of Cambridge). Earlier work on

Banbury was undertaken by S. Lauricella, ‘Economic

and social influences on marriage in Banbury, 1730–1841’

(unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge,

1997), ch. 3 and in particular figs 3.9 and 3.10, pp. 81–2.

Definitions of different types of parishes by Wrigley et al.

were as follows: ‘agricultural’ – those where 60 per cent

,

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V

The findings presented here for the case-study of Campton and Shefford indicate that the poor

law had little influence on the age at marriage of agricultural labourers. In these two

Bedfordshire communities, while there was a long-term decline in age at first marriage, fami-

lies received some form of allowances only after 1790 and usually for only limited periods, such

as 1800–1 and the post-war years. Allowances in these two communities were a temporary solu-

tion to an immediate crisis and were rarely the normal method of maintaining labourers.

Rather, the administration of payments to families was characterized by a high degree of flex-

ibility. This study has also found that allowances were usually allocated to very large families

only and, moreover, that many of these families went on to have further children but did not

require additional parish assistance. After the crisis of c. 1800, only 10–20 per cent of families

in Campton required pensions and the figure was half that for Shefford. In sum, it seems highly

unlikely that allowances were the cause of early marriages and larger families, despite Malthus’s

protestations. Instead, the research presented here suggests that allowances to large families

were a necessary response to the sharply worsened circumstances after 1790.

Note 27 continued

or more of the adult male labour force in the 1831 census were engaged in agriculture; ‘retail, trade and handicrafts’

– those with 40 per cent or more in this category at the same census; ‘manufacturing’ – 30 per cent or more; and

‘mixed’ – those parishes not complying with these other definitions. Wrigley et al., English population history,

pp. 28–39; ch. 5.

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